


think of them as my embrace

by slowlimbs



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: (kinda), Alternate Universe, Animal Death, Bottom Stanley Uris, Bullying, Dubious Consent, Homophobia, Homophobic Language, Inspired by Hades and Persephone (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), M/M, Patrick Hockstetter is His Own Warning, Religion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-19
Updated: 2021-02-19
Packaged: 2021-03-14 17:07:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29545587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slowlimbs/pseuds/slowlimbs
Summary: The Losers leave Derry, leave Stan Uris behind, and the seasons change.
Relationships: (background), Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, Patrick Hockstetter/Stanley Uris
Comments: 12
Kudos: 21





	think of them as my embrace

**Author's Note:**

  * For [liminalweirdo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/liminalweirdo/gifts).



> you guys. i don't even know. and i'd say i'm sorry but i'm not. i'm not.  
> title is from _chant_ (hadestown OBC).

Patrick Hockstetter is found in the junkyard two days after Henry Bowers is carted off to Juniper Hill, an immeasurable amount of time after the Losers cut their palms and swear an oath that’s bigger than any of them understand at twelve-and-thirteen. 

He is found, stick thin and bloody and reactive but  _ alive,  _ and Stan knows this because his father knows this and his father has decided for him that he is to be a man now. Which means knowing the ins and outs of the household. If the household means the synagogue and the ins and outs means gossip. Stan doesn’t like gossip. It makes him feel dirty on the inside, like someone’s opened a box of Count Chocula and scattered cereal into the furthest recesses of his mind.

(“It was an accident, Stanny!”

“It’ll be on purpose when I hang you from a tree with the hammock, shit for brains, we’re going to get  _ rats _ !”

And Richie had laughed and chewed wider and more obnoxiously until chocolate-spit ran from the edge of his mouth and Stan hit him with the end of a broom, because he didn’t see why the fuck he had to be the one sweeping up cocoa fucking corn puffs when he wasn’t the one throwing them at Eddie.)

And inside his head is more difficult to get clean than the outside. He can’t just take a broom to himself. Well, he could, but that would be weird and then he’d have to brand himself a deviant and at twelve-and-thirteen all of the Losers are already halfway there. There’s just some things that change after one bests an evil alien clown demon.

(Stan doesn’t believe in demons, but if he did, they’d look like Pennywise.)

He didn’t really think that his friendships would be one of them. One by one the Losers splinter. Beverly moves to Portland. Eddie’s mom gets even more crazy about his safety because, duh, he’d been gone for twenty four hours and then shown up covered in mud and shit and greywater seeping into his cast. Fucking duh. A year or so later has Ben moving away. Eventually it's just him, Bill, Richie, and sometimes Mike. When he can get away from the farm. His grandpa is sick. Stan’s mother sends him with a tuna casserole and huffs when he refuses to gossip on his return.

Patrick Hockstetter doesn’t come back to school. He doesn’t walk for his graduation. He gets an honorary diploma on account of seeing his best friend kill his other best friends. Stan doesn’t bring it up to the rest of them when he realises that couldn't have been what happened. Patrick had been missing for far longer than that single afternoon. Instead he just stares at himself in the mirror as days bleed into weeks, months, years and the scarring at the edges of his face heals puffy red pink white and turns into something barely noticeable, that Stan cannot unsee when he looks at himself. And well, he was never a painting. These days he doesn’t particularly want to be. Paintings can’t be trusted. 

(“I don’t understand what you have against it, Stanley.”

“I just don’t like it, dad. Something about it just feels wrong.” And his father had rolled his eyes and sighed and continued to wrap the canvas up in brown paper, because Stanley had been weird ever since the day he’d come home bloody faced and trembling, and he thought he’d lost his son forever. If the painting made him uncomfortable, then the painting was going to go.)

The other changes, outside of the splintering and cracking of a group Stan had once thought of as unshakeable and forever, come like trickles of rain and sunbeams. Richie, without Eddie, is crueller. Bill, without a cause, stops stuttering and starts writing. 

Mike’s grandpa is sick. And Stan just feels… Lonely. He’d meant it when he’d said he’d always be a Loser. He’ll mean that until the day he dies but he’s lost sight of what exactly that entails. How can the seven of them keep a vow when they’ve veered so harshly away from each other?

Beverly stops calling after their own graduation. Ben stops writing at the same time. Eddie pulls him to one side after the ceremony and whispers to him that his mom is taking him to New York for school, so they won’t see him that summer, either. Stan doesn’t tell him that they weren’t expecting to see him. He doesn’t ask him why he hasn’t sat with them at lunch for almost five fucking years. He could, but he doesn’t. Because he’s not Richie. Richie would ask, if Eddie ever gave him time to talk to him, but he hasn’t for a long time. He used to. Stan remembers that he used to. That he’d walk up to Eddie’s locker and find them deep in conversation, Richie leaning up against Bills, arms folded, eyes mean. They’d always stop talking about whatever it was whenever he turned up, though. 

That had stopped when Eddie turned sixteen. Stan doesn’t know why but he could hazard a guess.

So it’s lonely. It’s really, really fucking lonely. And when he’s lonely he still takes himself down to the Barrens because it’s safe there. He goes to the Barrens and he sits with a thermos of tea and his bird book and his walkman and egg mayo sandwiches and he doesn’t allow himself to feel bitter over the fact that Beverly had all but promised they’d stay friends. How can people stay friends if they never talk? How can people stay friends when it’s gotten to the point that he doesn’t even know if he’ll talk to them ever again? Stan still loves them. Of course he does. He doesn’t think it’s possible for him to fall out of love with a single one of them but… He doesn’t much like Richie anymore. Eddie is going away clear across the country and somehow, because he was the one to break the news, Richie has decided that it's Stan’s fault. 

(“What the fuck, Stanley?!”

“I don’t know, he told me after graduation. He said his mom wants him to go to school in New York.”

“New York is seven fucking hours away!”

“What do you care, Rich? You haven’t spoken to Eddie in almost two years.”

“I care! I still care about shit! He can’t go!”

“What, you want him to stay in Derry with you his whole life?”

“I’m not staying in fucking backwater hicksville Derry. I’m fucking out of here already. New York. That motherfucker, she’s done this on purpose.”

And then they’d argued over whether or not Sonia Kaspbrak had a personal vendetta against Richie, and whether this news was a part of it, and Richie had shoved Stan into the doorjamb on his raging way out.)

So Richie’s going to leave too. And Bill is sending off manuscripts to colleges that aren’t in Maine. 

And Mike’s grandpa is sick.

~

The Barrens never change. Not really. Not even after the flood which had, somehow, by some miracle of grace, avoided the Clubhouse. Stan had thought of God, of the Plagues, and of the Turtle. He hadn’t mentioned it to the others. Eddie’s God was the Catholic one. He asked for tithes and regret for everything. Eddie’s God wouldn’t have saved the Clubhouse. And Mike… Stan doesn’t know. Mike's God was a mystery to him; He liked music, liked joy, liked the celebration of Him and Stan isn’t sure He would have cared either way about the Clubhouse.

Which ultimately, really, left the Turtle. So Stan makes sure to be gentle with turtles when he goes and swims in the quarry, moving them with soft quick fingers ribboned around the bottoms of their shells.

The others don’t come swimming any more. They’re too grown up for kids summer games, despite not even having ceremonies that make them men. Beverly probably would have kept coming with him, but she moved. Derry is suddenly so, so lonely. So small. Small enough to fit in Stans cupped palms in late summer heat, small enough to fit through the nail-slits he makes in stalks and leaves when he sits in the Barrens and threads together flower crowns, small enough to be blown away with eraser flakes when he climbs the trees and sits in bowed branches to sketch the birds. It’s so small it could be swallowed down with a handful of the pills he sees Eddie  _ still _ taking, despite knowing they’re bullshit. Despite knowing they’re placebos. Stan doesn’t see him often, now, and Eddie stopped smiling at him after whispering at graduation that he was leaving, but there’s a handful of meetings between that and the day Eddie leaves for New York.

(“Richie broke my window last night.” Eddie had whispered in an undertone, standing shoulder to shoulder with him as they folded clothes at the laundromat, eyes downturned and red.

“ _ Broke _ -broke?”

“Yeah. The latch is totally fucked.” Stan could see it. Richie scaling the house like a spider, or a shadow, jamming his shoulder and then his elbow at where he knew the pressure would pop the lock. Climbing into Eddie’s room. He wasn’t sure he liked where this was going. “He doesn’t want me to go to New York. He wants me to run away with him.”

And Stan had glanced at him. At the bruises under his eyes, how pale he had become from being kept indoors, how puberty had robbed him of any boyhood fat and made him waif-skinny, and sighed.

“I think you should.”

“ _ What? _ ”

“I think you should, Eddie.” Hed glanced over his shoulder at Sonia Kaspbrak, somehow vaster and vaster even though they were growing taller than her, and felt a white hot coil of rage he didn’t think he would have been capable of before Neibolt. Before It. “She’s going to kill you before she lets you go. You’re going to be cold in the ground before you’re allowed to live your life.”

“That’s an awful thing to say.”

“Maybe,” and he’d turned away, laundry basket balanced on his hip, chores finished, “but it’s true.”)

The birds here know him now. Their parents had known him, too, and sometimes it’s jarring to think that he’s been coming to the same places for six years. Longer. A lifetime. There’s a family of magpies that have been circling him for as long as he can remember - something Mike had been afraid of for the longest time before Stan had shown him to exchange bottle caps for feathers, because they weren’t interested in eyes or soft parts now that Mike wasn’t a baby anymore. He saves all his caps and ring pulls in an old GI Joe thermos, and in the lift-up compartment of his bottom desk drawer he thinks he has enough black and white feathers for a headdress. He teaches himself how to press flowers and avoids his fathers questions about college because so much has already changed. So quickly that he feels dizzy, like the years spanning from the oath to now have just been this carousel of misunderstandings and hurt feelings and broken promises; easy to forget when they don’t have a mark on them to remind them of the duty they have to one another.

Eddie’s missing poster goes up at the end of the summer, and Stan says nothing. Richies one goes up a week later, and he stays silent. He gets a Christmas card signed with both of their names, containing a Polaroid of the pair of them kissing in Times Square, and that feels right. 

He hides it in the compartment in his desk drawer, puts his two thermoses (tea, and shining things) in his backpack. A little snow is no longer an excuse for him not to be out in the Barrens every second he has spare. His father has allowed him a year to decide what he wants to do and where. Stan doesn’t think that’s long enough, because what he wants to do is somehow go back in time to when he had friends and they were all a part of one another down to their trembling bones. He doesn’t tell Sonia that her son is still very much alive, and he didn’t go to the funeral they’d held for him without a body. 

His father hadn’t pushed. And he doesn’t hear from them again. He just has that card, the polaroid, and he knows in some deep way that like Bev and Ben they’ve forgotten all about him. Maybe about Derry as a whole. And Stan doesn’t want to forget. He  _ doesn’t. _ So he has to stay in Derry. He has to stay close to where he’s been loved and has loved in return. He’s not sure his father would accept that as reasoning to  _ not _ go to college.

~

When the snow melts and gives way to spring, Mike's grandpa dies. He comes down to the Barrens one last time before he leaves for Florida, holds Stan so tight Stan feels it etched into his ribs the next day, and cries softly into his hair. How wrong, and how fitting it is that spring should mark new beginnings and bring with it death. How wrong it is that Stan should be alone in Derry, now. The only one carrying the Deadlights in his heart. The only one still honouring the Turtle with all his little rituals and offerings. He’s forgotten all about Patrick Hockstetter, all about Henry Bowers slitting the throats of Belch and Vic and his father on the couch. Bullies. Just bullies. Nothing in comparison to the true horror he knows is dead beneath the town, rotting and stinking and dead dead dead.

A weekend in April has him discovering his magpie friends nest smashed and ruined on the forest floor. Little pink featherless bodies in eggshells, bulging black-purple eyes unseeing. Not even open. Not even  _ born _ . The adults cry at him from somewhere high above, circling and circling and not coming down to peck corn from his hands, and it feels like the last fucking straw. With everyone gone all he has are his birds. He kneels among the ruins of what should have been another generation of wings and thievery, gathers what he can in his hands and doesn’t care that his knees and his fingers are slimy and muddy and disgusting. That’s what death is. That’s what forgetting is. It’s creeping and soundless and abhorrent and unwanted. Like the little cold bodies in his palms.

He buries them in the stretch of meadow between the train tracks and the Barrens and cries until his throat is raw.

~

The meadow bleeds upwards with poppies and dandelions, and Stan can’t seem to win back the good graces of his magpies, so he focuses on making friends with the rabbits instead. Soft little twitching noses and cotton tails and if Eddie were here he’d be screaming about myxomatosis and rabies but he’s in New York with Richie and Stan wonders sometimes if he’s as worried about AIDS as he used to be. The rabbits eat cucumbers and sweet bell peppers from his fingers, gambol around him and it’s… well, he’s still lonely. It’s not the same. But they’re still living creatures who hop up at the sight of him and keep watchful vigil while he sits with the grass and the flowers growing above his head, consuming books of poetry and all the mixtapes each of them had left in the Clubhouse.

Stan doesn’t go down there any more. The dark seems darker without six other bodies with him.

He’s so used to being entirely alone out here that it startles him just as badly as it does the rabbits when he hears the snapping of twigs and underbrush beneath heavy boots. The only difference is that the rabbits have the luxury of scattering, leaping through shrubbery back into their warrens. At first Stan thinks it must be some wild animal, some predator with snapping jaws and clutching claws come to eat him up. The big bad wolf. The legendary Jaguar that Stans never seen but that apparently stalks Derry every year. He’s not far off. When he looks up there’s a darkness in the lush green that sharpens into the shape of a person instead of a wildcat, but the shifting of shoulders in the sunlight is a creature ready to pounce, the glint of silver-blue-fern is something with teeth ready to give chase, stalking closer and closer and for a moment Stan thinks of the dead kids he’d seen in the standpipe, before the woman from that fucking painting had closed her awful mouth over his face and stopped him breathing.

Stan doesn’t bolt. He doesn’t run. Just watches, still and silent, as Patrick Hockstetter emerges into the wide patch of field that’s been flattened under Stans shoes and body. He waits for the derogatory remark, the biting comment, the shove back into the dirt. His cheek stings cold with the memory of snow and blood, but it’s spring, and it’s warm, and Patrick doesn’t say anything. He just sits, cross legged, a few feet away and keeps his eyes on Stans face. Like he’s waiting for fear. Fear that Stan no longer feels for real things.

He has this scar above his eyebrow and Stan thinks once again of that painting. The needle points digging into his skin. What form had It taken in order to eat him? Stan closes his book, holds eye contact like he’s dealing with a tiger, shifts his weight until he at least has the  _ option  _ of running if he needs to, and watches Patrick do the same. What baffles Stan is how empty his gaze is. Deeper than the creek and darker. Nothing like Beverly's brilliant blue. Beverly is summer lakes and skies and bluebirds. Patrick… is unfathomable. Mariana Trench. Things slithering and eating each other in the deep. And yet Stan still isn’t scared. He isn’t. The birds are silent, like they know something is wrong, and Patrick tilts his head to one side like he’s considering him.

He reminds Stan, in some absurd way, of the painting. Limbs stretched too long and smile too toothy and wide. Angles and valleys; too striking. And that, that’s what gives him that first thrill of terror. That Patrick could unhinge his jaw and swallow him down into the grey water again.

“You didn’t leave with your little fairy friends.” It’s not a question, so Stan doesn’t answer. Just raises his eyebrows at him as if to say  _ well obviously _ , and blinks slowly. Unthreatening. No sudden movements in the viper pit. Patrick's smile grows, like a grimace, humourless. Like someone who’s only heard stories about happiness and friendliness. “ _ Why _ didn’t you leave with your little fairy friends?”

“I don’t know.” Because he doesn’t. And he doesn’t like this cobra like staring contest, either. It makes him think of snake charming. Which makes him think of flutes. Which makes him think of the painting. “The timing isn’t right.”

“Oh?” Light and, like before, with the tone of someone who’s only heard of conversations in abstract. “I saw them. Tozier and Kaspbrak. It would break their mamas hearts to know they left  _ together _ .” Well, yeah. Stan shrugs again;  _ well, obviously _ . “I always knew Kaspbrak was a little queer. Tozier, I suspected, but Kaspbrak’s so gay it’s  _ laughable. _ ”

“You don’t get to laugh at my friends when yours are dead or insane.” He doesn’t, generally, believe himself capable of cruelty. Not in the same way Richie is, not in the same way Beverly can be. He doesn’t go out of his way to push people's buttons or pull their levers but this is unfair. Eddie and Richie aren’t here to defend themselves. He winces, expecting rage, expecting his face pressed to the dirt instead of into ice and snow, expecting pain, but Patrick just slithers out this laugh -  _ khkhkh _ like Muttley from Wacky Races - and shifts to crouch instead of sitting. Stan moves too, gets one foot flat on the ground and pulls to kneeling, gaze steady and wary as a field mouse listening for the silent flight of the owl overhead.

“ _ Are  _ they still your friends, Stanley Urine? Or are you like me?” Like Patrick Hockstetter? Stan’s laugh barks in a different way, fuller, more real, less forced and more surprised than anything. How could he be like Patrick Hockstetter? “Maybe you’ve been forgotten, too. Maybe they never wanted you around in the first place.” And there's a flash of something through the depths, their eyes still holding, Patrick resting the side of his thumb against his withering grin as he speaks. He’s still wearing those fucking rings. He still looks like a schoolyard bully at twenty years old. Maybe that’s why Stan isn’t scared. Bullies don’t scare him now. 

But Eddie had said - whispered it to him honey-rye sweet and pink cheeked, down in the clubhouse where there’s still a stash of hooch which would probably make Stan sick if he tried to drink it now - grown ups are worse. Grown ups are the real monsters because they don’t listen. They don’t see. Stan doesn’t know when he’ll start counting as a grown up. He couldn’t imagine being blind and deaf to the world around him. He blinks himself out of his thoughts to squint across the dead grass at him, at the lank dark hair and the lank long limbs and the too-skinny hips and where he can see that Patrick is wearing long johns beneath his clothes even though its (summer, we’re kids, we’re supposed to be having fun) spring. The nights are still cold.

“Like you.” A statement, because Patrick seems to struggle with questions, seems confused about opinions and events and Stan doesn’t know whether that’s the effect of the sewers or whether Patrick has always been like that. Patrick nods, runs the pad of his thumb over his lower lip and rocks back halfway to sit on his heels. Like him. Alone. He hadn’t meant it with cruelty. Hadn’t been trying to get under Stan’s skin like he had done so many times with so many kids at school. This is different. Either because they’re grown up, or… Or because Bowers isn’t around to make him despicable. 

“Like me.” They stand as one, Patrick still grinning and Stan still cautious, not taking his eyes off of him as he dusts off the seat of his jeans and pulls a crumpled cigarette packet out of his pocket. His eyes flare orange and terrifying with the lighters flame and Stan swallows, because that-- That causes fear. That causes the first ripple of unease through him: he hasn’t been exactly comfortable with Patrick here, he wouldn’t choose it, but the way the flicker of fire lights his eyes golden red like a clowns and Stan feels an ancient primordial panic. To stay away from the strange. To run like a rabbit into the trees until he finds somewhere safe and high where he can watch as the predator passes. But then, there are problems with that too, because Patrick holds fire in his hands and the spring grass is dry, and climbing trees to escape flames simply doesn’t work.

Stan watches him exhale a long line of smoke, almost purple, watches the longer lines of his legs as he steps closer. He thinks, sometimes, that some human beings are prey animals too. He should have been born with eyes on the sides of his head to watch for boys like Patrick. 

“I smashed the nest.” Patrick smiles, like a snake, like something coiled and hidden that would be inescapable even with prey instincts, and Stan goes cold all over despite the sunshine. Opens his mouth and then closes it again, because what would be the point? There’s nothing Stan can possibly say to that, whispered into the dust of the afternoon. He has to remember that this is the same boy who killed his baby brother, according to Sonia Kaspbrak and the other moms from Eddie’s church. Everyone knows. No one seems to care. Such is life in Derry, maybe. Everyone knowing, no one caring. An endless cycle of infanticide can be ignored for hundreds of years. What’s one more baby? The birds in the Barrens are routinely hunted by the town's cats. What’s one more clutch of magpie chicks? This is Patrick poking for a reaction - Richie, but crueller, with real malice. Or without the very concept of what malice  _ is _ , just doing things for the sake of doing them - why would he rise to that? Why bother?

So he says nothing. Keeps his eyes on him as Patrick circles, like a vulture. Like a magpie. Watches ash flake from the cherry glowing at the end of his cigarette and drift away on the breeze like flakes of snow or skin. 

Bill gets dandruff like it. Storming onto the shoulders of his shirt in those two week periods between one shampoo not working any more and another taking its place. And the smoke, well. The smoke itself smells like Beverly, so it must be her brand. It smells like the Clubhouse the day after she and Richie spent the night and got drunk on Wentworths beer.

“They won’t come down, anymore, since I did that.” Thick and quiet, still with that graceful prowl, spiralling maybe closer than he should. Stan hopes he’s not planning on doing anything with that red coal. If he burns up the meadow, where will the rabbits live? “Not even for you.” 

“No. They’ve got nothing to come down for, now. Why should they trust us? When you did that?” It comes out more hurt than Stan means it to, because he’s trying for emotionless. Trying to mirror Patrick so that he doesn’t lash out at him. So he can go home. So he can lay on his bed and think about college until he feels sicker than he does right now. So he can think about what nine-to-five job he can get to grind away at until he retires or dies, until the walls start to close in and he feels all at once very sorry for Eddie and his wheezing chest.

“I wanted to see what was inside.” What else did he expect? Patrick pauses in front of him, eyes like rain-slick slate, looks at him from his curls to his sneakers and back again in one quick unforgiving moment and grins. Crushes his cigarette out in his hand and leans down to deposit the remains into the last half of Stan’s tea. The hiss of embers dying, the soot stain on Patrick’s palm and the way Stan has to swallow around the sudden dryness in his throat melt together and happen simultaneously. He’s - surprisingly - never been thirstier than he is right at this moment and it’s like Patrick knows it. He stays half crouched before him like some Hammer Horror version of a knight, squints his silver eyes towards the sun and turns the thermos so that the handle is facing Stan. Who can see the butt of the cigarette floating around inside, and swallows again.

“Well?” It’s with a vaguely southern accent, like something out of the Clint Eastwood movies Richie always brings to sleepovers. Always brought to sleepovers. He’s in New York now. Stan blinks, furrows his eyebrows and feels where his scarring sort of pulls at his hairline.

“‘Well’, what?”

“You’re thirsty.” The bottom of his stomach drops. There’s no way on earth Patrick means what Stan thinks he might mean, but then—, “take a drink, Stanley.” And it’s only because of the glint in Patrick’s eye that he obeys. He tells himself it’s only because of the glint because why else would he do it? 

And in the end, it basically tastes like nothing anyway. He doesn’t swallow the curled filter, doesn’t flinch when it bumps his top lip, and reminds himself that in olden days people would wash their clothes with ash. Ash is sterile. Ash is harmless. And fire cleanses all things. He wipes his mouth when he’s finished - thirst quenched - and realises as he’s screwing the cap back on that neither he nor Patrick have blinked, or looked away from one another, for a handful of minutes. Stan doesn’t, exactly, want to examine what that might mean too closely. The same way he doesn’t really want to admit to himself that if Patrick knew where to find the magpie nest then he’s been out here watching Stan for far longer than today. Without being seen. Without being heard. 

Patrick’s mouth twitches, like he might smile, but he doesn’t. 

“Good.” He reaches out, and it’s only then that Stan realises  _ how _ close they are, because his fingertips brush the ends of his curls on his forehead and that's what breaks the strange lulling spell. He flinches away, snatches up his book and his bag and tucks everything under one arm as he turns and sprints for home.

Patrick’s laughter is a howling death rattle at his heels.

~

The rabbits still trust him, which is a relief, especially when he realises he’s avoiding the meadow like a plague. Spending his days up in trees with watchful starling-brown eyes, never truly relaxing but unable to stay inside when the weather is just getting hotter and hotter and there are flowers blooming all over the Barrens. When he returns to that stomped down grass arena it’s with a backpack full of food, two thermos’, and a strange feeling of anticipation curling through his stomach like a fucking tapeworm. He keeps thinking about how Patrick had reached for him. How he’d moved his hair like a breeze. How the lack of malice in the movement had scared Stan deeper than being made to drink ashy tea.

It had tasted of nothing, anyway. 

But he’s nowhere to be seen, and the rabbits had scattered last time, and today they’re back to bunny hopping each other and scrambling into Stan’s lap to be fed dandelions. So, today, it’s safe. And he doesn’t feel disappointment over that fact. Feeling disappointment over a distinct  _ lack _ of something not quite right would be weird. But then, this is Derry, and even now it still smells like sewage and yawning churchyards and mottled grey rotting hands reaching out of standpipes. Derry itself is not quite right. And at least Patrick, as a threat, is familiar. At least Stan knows he can outstrip him out here, by the trees. He can run for the Clubhouse, if he really needs to. He can run the opposite way and dart across the train tracks and back to town. If he really needs to. Today he doesn’t. Today he eats tuna salad sandwiches and threads poppies and buttercups and foxgloves and heather and straw through a wire loop until a crown starts to form. He does this for no reason aside from the fact that he  _ can _ , and that it’s time consuming and gives him something to do with his long spindly fingers that  _ isn’t _ connected to Patrick fucking Hockstetter. This is creation. Patrick Hockstetter does nothing but destroy. Like the mortal form of one of the four horsemen, except Stan can’t decide which one he would be. With his slimy smiles and grubby nails he could be pestilence. With the bones protruding at his elbows, his ankles, his collarbones and cheeks he could be famine. Not that Stan examines the imperfect symmetry of his face. Not… not these days, anyway. 

Maybe he’d looked in school. Maybe. But only because he’d looked at  _ everyone _ . Only because he hadn’t been as sure as Richie and Eddie are with each other. Only because out of the seven of them he was always the one not being touched. Not being watched back. Not being looked at. No one looks at him now, either, but everyone he loves has forgotten Derry. And he’s so busy thinking about how Patrick is going to bring about the end of the world that he barely even notices when his thumb slips and slices over a jagged part of copper from deep within plucked foliage. 

If Eddie were here he'd ask for a band aid. But Eddie is in New York with Richie. How does that work, if they’ve all forgotten? How does them being together work if they can’t remember the things that tie them so closely?

Stan makes a face at the blood beading along the cut and sucks it into his mouth. It takes like copper and ash and he’s still lapping it clean when he realises the rabbits aren’t coming back to him any more. Looks around, eyebrows furrowed, lips still caught around his knuckle, and maybe it’s from the smell of blood. Maybe they can smell it and it spooked them. On the other hand, he doesn’t know how long he was off in his own head, how long he was contemplating the implications of amnesia and Revelations. The sun is setting, now. Painting the sky and the darkening treeline with burning oranges and yellows and purples and deep deep navy blues. Causing strange shadows to leap out of the Barrens at him. Stan gets a chill, all the way from his tailbone up to the top of his skull, every single hair standing on end, and it’s not just because he’s remembered Judith, again. It’s not just because the forest looks dark and deep and inviting in its promise of nightmares. No. The chill happens because—

_ Khkhkh _ , behind him, and then impossible skeletal fingers on his shoulders pulling him sharply backwards. Tipping him over into the dirt like a turtle. Stan lets out a harsh woof of a breath and his eyes go wide and he - accidentally - bites his thumb so hard that blood spurts down his throat and across his teeth and then it’s Patrick Hockstetter crouching over him in front of school calling him a flamer. It’s Patrick Hockstetter purposefully choosing the urinal closest to Eddie to laugh at him. It’s Patrick Hockstetter sitting behind him on the school bus leaning too far forward until Stan can feel his breath on the back of his neck like a wolf. And yet his fear - the one It had shown him - was never wolves. That was Richie’s. 

Here and now, in his meadow with the rabbits long gone underground, Patrick Hockstetter doesn’t call him a flamer. He doesn't pant hot over his neck like he wants to eat him. He just kneels over his chest and grins down at him like this is some great game. Which maybe, it is. 

Kittens learn how to hunt by playing, after all.

“You ran away from me last week.” He’s chuckling, and it sounds hollow, like he’s imitating something, and Stan thinks that maybe in another life Patrick Hockstetter and Richie might have bonded over their ability to shape their voices into anything they want. “Did Not give you a chance this time, though.” He bares his teeth and Stan thinks again of wolves, of foxes, of polecats and rats. Things which go for the jugular when threatened. So, Stan thinks, don’t be a threat. Play dead. Watches those oversized incisors snap at him, and wonders… How much of what Patrick does is pretence? How much of his behaviour is modelled off of television and cartoons and the people in Derry? Is it Derry, rather than a natural predisposition for it, which makes him dangerous?

Are the others different, away from Derry? Would he, Stan, be different too?

“Get off of me.” Calm, clear hazel eyes on his face, watching the twist of muscle jump in his jaw, watching his pupils dilate and then retract back into pinpricks. Colourless irises. They make him think of greywater. Make him think of the shade Eddie went when Richie grasped his arm between his hands and crunched it into a swollen mess. The colour Richie had gone when Sonia Kaspbrak had bundled him into her station wagon and turned her stupid fat fingers to accuse them all. Grown ups are the real monsters, Eddie had said, after sneaking out of his bedroom window and landing in their outstretched arms like someone escaping a burning building. Grown ups are the real monsters, tipsy on stolen beer, his dark eyes on Richie changing cassettes, avoiding the hammock at all costs. 

“No.” Patrick grins, and those fucking teeth. Maybe he’s afraid of leeches because he so much resembles one. “I’ll get my pants dirty.” There’s already dust all over his knees, so Stan knows thats a stupid argument, but then Patrick isn’t exactly holding him down. He could probably escape if he wanted to. He could probably get away if he thought something… bad would happen. Patrick killed his baby brother. Patrick had a refrigerator in the junkyard where he would put animals. Beverly saw. Beverly saw more than that but Stan doesn’t want to think about the rest of it when Patrick is still straddling his chest. He’s having a hard enough time keeping his breathing even as it is, because any minute now Patrick is going to lean down and press his mouth to his ear and call him a flamer and then it’ll all be over. Then Patrick will have real ammunition if that’s what he’s trying to do.

“Get  _ off. _ ”

“Make me.” Again, like it’s a game, like they’re playing. “You got arms, Uris, use them.” With that Southern twang again. Like he’s playing at being a cowboy. And maybe-- maybe it is just a game. Maybe he won’t actually hurt Stan. Maybe. Maybe maybe. So he hooks both arms under Patrick’s knees, with a little difficulty, and puts all his weight behind his breastbone to sit up and flip him into the dead grass. He feels the blood from his thumb smear over the back of Patrick’s jeans and well, so much for not wanting to get those dirty. There’s a moment of static ringing in his ears, between the first contact of Stan willingly touching him, and his shoulder hitting the ground in which Stan feels exhilarated. Strong. Solid in a way that he doesn’t, always, these days. With the weight of Patrick gone he sits up, wipes the back of his hand over his mouth and blinks down at him. Curled on his side and laughing - not the  _ khkhkh _ of triumph, of getting one over on him, but real throaty gurgling laughter. Clutching his stomach with his arms and pressing his cheek into the dirt and convulsing with it.

Stan doesn’t notice he’s smiling until Patrick’s eyes flash to his. Colourless. Pale. Shuttered hunting-animal eyes. 

“Who knew the Jew boy could fight back, huh?”

“Shut up.”

“Thought you and your friends were  _ pacifists _ , Stanley Uris.”

“Clearly you don’t know the first thing about us.” And maybe saying that is a mistake, because the speed at which Patrick sits up is impossible to follow and if he were any closer they’d be brushing noses and Stan really, really doesn’t want to think about that. 

“You have blood on your mouth.”

“I cut my thumb.” He gestures to the flower crown, half finished, and holds up his hand to prove it. Patrick follows the line of his fingers and his mouth twists, does something beyond pretending, and he licks his bottom lip before looking back at him.

“You really are a little fairy, aren’t you.” Stan frowns. Opens his mouth to argue, but Patrick’s grin is sharp as rusted nails. “You got a toadstool house somewhere in the woods, Tinkerbell?” Long pale fingers reaching across him to clasp around the circle of wire, more careful and gentle than Stan thought him capable of, lifting it with a hook of his thumb to examine it. 

“Tinkerbell didn’t live in a toadstool.” There’s always, always something of the clown, of Judith in Patrick’s eyes. Something shuttered and silver, barely human. Stan turns his own away when they flash to him, ignores the fucking grin, because what would the others say if they were here? If they saw him like this, conversing with him like he hadn’t been present for Stan’s snow-wash? What would they say, if they could remember? What would Mike say, with his soft cow-eyes and his dead dog buried in the backyard? What would Bill say? Stan bites down hard on the inside of his cheek until he tastes blood there too, and jumps like a skittish mare when the flower crown is plonked unceremoniously on his head. Those fingers in his curls again, and he doesn’t jerk away this time. Lets Patrick neaten them under dandelions and daisies and heather, lets him straighten it against his scalp, eyes downcast so he doesn’t have to look at his expression and pick it apart. Derry is lonely. Derry is so lonely for a boy like him.

When he does, eventually, raise his gaze from the dirt it’s almost as if Patrick looks confused. He’s leaned in so close that his breath moves Stan’s eyelashes, and his stomach gives an age old instinctive frightened leap. Like the prehistoric remembrance of ancient things waiting in the dark, like he’s in a cave in the woods before the discovery of fire, knowing that something uncanny and man eating is out there in the night and just… waiting for it. 

Patrick’s fingers fall over his temple, the hinge of his jaw, expression set and explorative, eyebrows drawn in and mouth slightly open. To the pulse raging in his neck, all that hot blood waiting to be spilled, pupils dark and bottomless when they flicker down over him. Down to the scratch on his thumb, hand encircling his wrist to bring it up to his face and examine it. Stan knows, he  _ knows  _ he should run. Should scream. Should do something other than sit here watching Patrick kneel before him, holding his wrist with one hand and prising the cut apart between forefinger and thumb of the other to make it weep. 

“When were you born, Stanley Uris?” He’s speaking to the drop of ruby on his skin, riveted, like something hungry, and Stan’s back teeth clench until his jaw aches with it. Pain on pain, neither one severe enough to stop what’s happening. Whatever that is.

“July.”

“Summer,” those eyes dart up to him, and Stan thinks what he always does. That Patrick is more animal than human. More eldritch than mortal. Will outlast them all, probably. “Yes.” Like it’s obvious. Like he was asking to test Stan’s memory, not to get an answer. “Little birds stick around for the summer. Where will you be going in winter, I wonder?”

Quick as lightning, as the direction changes of a murmuration, Patrick brings Stan’s hand to his mouth and closes his lips around the cut. And Stan tries to tell himself - he’s lonely. He would take human contact from anyone, at this point, anyone else who had seen It and understands that in Derry evil lives in the soil and the water and they all of them drink it down like the finest wine. He tries to tell himself that the gasp is from shock and nothing else, but ultimately… Patrick’s tongue is hot and smoke-soft and his uneven teeth press down against the edges of the wound like gears slotting into place and Stan can see him calling him a  _ flamer  _ and jerking his kippah away like a cat with a toad, gleeful in the face of a game, always playing because he never learned any other way to be. 

No one’s tried to teach him. Or maybe they did, and it didn’t stick. Either way that's what this is. Patricks eyes on his face and his mouth stretching into a smile around his skin, jostling at him when he tries to pull away, pulling him in tighter until his wrist bones click and shift in his grip.

“No running today, little bird. No flying, either.” 

“Stop it.”

“No.” He lifts his chin slightly, defiant, and it’s then that Stan notices how much longer his hair is now. Tangled and wild to the middle of his neck, to his collarbones like monuments under the collar of his shirt. And now he, too, has Stan’s blood in his mouth. “If you wanted me to stop you could fight me off. You’re not fighting.” Huh. Well that’s true. Stan is resisting, has resisted things - temptations - all his life, but he’s not much of a fighter. That much is true. He couldn’t fight Judith off. He could only fight the fucking clown because he was surrounded by people he loved and who loved him. Except they left. And maybe love doesn’t last forever. What can he do to fight Patrick Hockstetter in the dwindling spring light, on his own, in a town long forgotten by the best people in the world?

Even when his mother and father look at him these days it’s like their gaze skirts around him. He feels like a ghost in his own home, more often than not, now. Maybe that’s what he is. Maybe his body has long since rotted into slime and nothing under Derry.

“Stop.” He whispers into the evening closing in around them like a fist, and his voice doesn’t sound like his own. Too low, too pleading, too… too much like sitting in for confession, something he’s never had to do, because his God isn’t Catholic. Sometimes he doesn’t know what his God is, anymore. Patrick smiles, red rimmed and ethereal and snakelike. Replaces his mouth with a little shake of his head which sends his hair fluttering into his face. Over those silver coin, river Styx eyes. Payment for the dead. Which Stan maybe already is. Patrick laps at the blood until Stan is dizzy from it, from remembering the close-toothed swallow of Judith down in the sewers and wondering how, exactly, this is different. From one god of death to another. And then it’s not his thumb anymore. It’s his wrist, fingers hard on his forearm to push his sleeve up, lips following up to the inside of his elbow, teeth bared and garnets against the pale stretch. 

Maybe he doesn’t want Patrick to stop. Maybe he’s right. But how can he be sure when he suddenly feels like nothing exists outside of this meadow? How can he be certain when Patrick is getting closer and closer the further his lips brush? 

How can he be certain of anything when he’s already faced the impossible?

And where will he go, in the winter? Patrick’s mouth against his shoulder, through material, thigh between his, his grinning face above him five years ago like a wild cat  _ flamer.  _ Maybe Stan is. It’s not something he’s considered, really, before now. He knows he likes the long legs he sees under skirts, sometimes. Knows he likes when Greta Bowie blushes even if it’s not Greta Bowie he’s attracted to. And some small, muffled, restricted part of him liked it when Patrick knelt over him and called him… called him what he called him. Some small part of him rose to the surface when Patrick told him that he really was a fairy. Even if he didn’t mean it like that.

“Don’t.” He murmurs, but it’s without conviction, and Patrick huffs a laugh against his neck. “It’s getting late. My mother’ll be expecting me home.”

“You don’t come when I expect you, little bird. You’ve been avoiding me.” Into his ear, down his trembling throat, still laced with that humour. “I waited and waited. And you didn’t come out to play.” He’s not even holding him, anymore, so what excuse does he have for not fighting back? Not fighting him off? What excuse does he have for the way his breath shakes in his chest and out into the twilight? Patrick reaches up to take the flower crown from his head, frisbees it like he had done at the end of school a million years ago, except this time there’s no mention of Stan being a loser. It’s then that he holds him. Pushes him down into the dust and climbs over him again but without a trace of playfulness. The game is finished and Patrick has won. Stan isn’t even thinking of the others anymore. They exist on a plane beyond the meadow, beyond the Barrens. They chose to leave. They chose to leave him here with no word on whether he could come too, and oh God, he doesn’t have it in him to resent them for it, because Patrick’s breath smells like grass and blood and old cigarettes and everything he finds repulsive and then… then he’s kissing back anyway. 

His first fucking kiss. With Patrick fucking Hockstetter. Who Beverly had seen on his knees in prayer in the junkyard, kneeling before Henry Bowers, without kissing him. It tastes of metal and decay and ash, dead things in a sewer, penance for a soul lost to the ferryman, and before he can stop himself his mouth is opening for that shedded-velvet staglike tongue, and Patrick is licking through his lips like he’s trying to eat him alive. Maybe he is. 

It lasts until the moon rises, a sickle in the dark clouds. Patrick kisses him until he can't breathe, can’t speak, can’t think, and then rises like smoke from the ground and leaves him there. Open mouthed and panting, shellshocked, aching for less and more all at the same time and Stan wonders. Wonders if he’s known that this is within him since that day.  _ Flamer  _ on his lips like a caress. 

“Don’t make me wait again, little bird.” And Stan thinks he won’t. Oh God, he won’t. Stares up at him as he lights a cigarette, draws on it deeply, blows smoke like a howl to that deathless moon above them

~

It becomes a habit quicker than Stanley would like to admit, and he doesn’t know when he starts to think of himself as  _ Stanley. _ Only that Patrick often says it with the same intonation as  _ flamer fairy fag queer _ when it’s whispered into his hair hidden by long grass and monkshood. Like it’s something tender, softer each time they meet and tumble together into the world that Patrick is cracking open in the soil for them. Little bird, he calls him, between seeking cannibalistic kisses. Little bird. Starling. Mouse. Song thrush. Robin. All these birds spilling from his lips like it’s affection. Stan would believe it was affection if he believed Patrick felt things like that. But he doesn’t. If anything this is claiming. This is ownership. It’s a subtle rearranging and kidnapping of the soul and Stan’s stopped praying to his old god in favour of a new one. It’s the repeated smashing of a magpies nest into Stan’s psyche, to open him up and see what’s there. As the summer sun steals away more and more of the night they stay later and later, and Patrick eats the food Stan brings and drinks the tea and smokes on his back beside him after he’s kissed him breathless and dumbfounded. 

One day Patrick doesn’t show up, and in his place there’s a crown not made of blooms but of bones. Tied and welded together as though effort and thought has been put into it. Stan takes it home and examines himself in the mirror with it resting on his head, unclothed, pale and bruise-eyed under the bathroom fluorescents until shower steam fogs it and he remembers himself.

He’s forgotten the others. He’s forgotten the others like they forgot him.

~

“I want you to come with me, for the winter, sparrow.” They’ve made the transition from the meadow to the junkyard, because autumn is closing in, and it’s colder than Stan remembers Derry being. “Birds fly south for the winter. Fly with me.” How can he say no? How can he say no when Patrick is stretched over the length of his back, his mouth against the thumb of his birdlike pulse soaring soaring soaring with every press of his hips forward? Stan cries out, rough, his crown of bones already tumbled to the floor of this old burned out car. It isn’t the place he would have picked, a year ago, to lose his virginity. But here he is. Sweating and groaning under the weight of this man who is tearing him apart like a pillow to see what drives his heart to beat. To see if it’s him. His rhythm is hard and unforgiving and  _ painful _ and addictive. How could Stan say anything but  _ yes _ , speared here like he is? Throat tipped back for his hand, air restricted, an unborn magpie chick blinking and unseeing and bloody between Patrick’s palms, skin sticking over the worn leather, their breath steaming in the air? Dark now. Darker than imagining. Darker than blood. 

Patrick runs a hand down the back of his thigh, up the side, fingers curling under him to wrap around his leaking dick and Stan calls out his name like he’s crying for God. He says yes. He says yes, yes, yes, yes because what else is there? What else is there in his life but Patrick? Patrick with his bones and his dead animals and whispering against the back of his neck, cursing and praising him in the same breath, calling him sparrow and Stanley and faggot and… and  _ his.  _ Only his. Only his for the whole winter, and if he’s good, maybe he’ll let him come home for springtime. Maybe he won’t just go missing like those kids years ago.

When Stan comes it’s loud and joyful, a nymph in the first melt of summer, throbbing through him with Patrick’s name and his body so deep inside him they could be one creature. They could be a rat king. Patrick’s hands go skeletal and hard on his hips and then--.

“I’m coming.” And Stan gasps, and inside it’s so hot. Like hell. Like Hades.

~

No one puts up a missing poster for Stanley Uris. He’s nineteen. He’s not missing. He leaves Derry in the passenger seat of Patrick’s car, dozing in the early morning breeze, bags packed and savings rolled into socks at the bottom of his suitcase. 

He doesn’t want to be found.

**Author's Note:**

> come play on tumblr, i'm slowlimbs there too.


End file.
